Why Having Deep Water in Your lessons matters to your child's safety...
I'm hearing good things about a few of the pop up swim centers located in shopping malls. That is encouraging as there are not enough good lessons to help everyone who needs to learn to swim!
But they are missing one key ingredient that you want to be sure to cover with your child...
DEEP WATER...
It's true that the same skills exactly apply in shallow water than in deep. If you can tread, you can tread, and if you can float, you can float, it doesn't matter one bit how deep that water is.
But we as parents tend to put a lot of fear into our kids about deep water in the efforts to keep them safe when they are little. We say things like, "Stay away from that water, it's deep!"
The only true learning is from experience. Thus it's important that you give your kids some deep water experiences so that they can learn to trust it!
In my lessons, even in the youngest water safety class, we take the kids to the deep water usually on the second or third lesson to show them it's the same. You will hear me say this 1000's of times a summer, "See?" "It's the same!' Once they have that confidence that their skills translate to any depth, they are so much more safe in all depths. So be sure to give them that experience if the facility from which you are taking lessons, does not have deep water!